“The riders are the only real vulnerability,” Pritkin continued softly. “An external mind for the brainless creation. If you ever have to fight one, don’t go for the creature itself; go for the one controlling it.”
“I don’t intend to fight one,” I told him fervently.
“Don’t think you’d win?”
I turned to look at him incredulously. “No?”
He laughed, and this time, he didn’t bother to lower his voice.
“Shh!” I hissed, and tried to get a mitten over his mouth.
He caught my wrist, then just stayed there for a moment, regarding me thoughtfully. Before turning my hand over, tugging down the flap on my glove, and pressing a kiss to the strip of skin he’d revealed. My whole body suddenly went warm.
“You’re in a good mood,” I said, trying for jovial. But it came out sounding more like Marilyn Monroe visiting a Kennedy. I decided to blame it on the weather.
Only that doesn’t work so well when you’re dating an incubus.
Green eyes flashed hot in the cold-reddened face, almost as much as the lips still pressed to my pulse. I swear I could feel the heat radiating all the way up my arm. And into other places, I thought, squirming, as liquid warmth spilled through me.
My breath caught, my body tightened, and the grin on my partner’s face expanded. “Your cheeks are red,” he informed me.
“It’s cold.” I tried moving back a few feet, to keep a safe distance between us, if there was such a thing anymore, but he came with me. In a sinuous movement entirely unlike the man I knew, whose motions were precise, calculated, and efficient. Pritkin moved like a soldier, which is what he was, what he’d been for almost a century, not like . . . not like that.
“Your lips are, too.” His head lowered, but stopped just short of the area in question.
“It’s very cold,” I whispered.
“It is.” His breath was warm against my face. “You could catch your death.”
That’s what I’m afraid of, I thought, slightly hysterically. Because a mountaintop in Faerie with murderous . . . things . . . all around and our only lifeline the thin tether of my power, streaming through the portal far below, was not the place for this—whatever this was.
And I guess Pritkin realized that, too, because he pulled back after a moment, ducking his head and looking rueful. “Sorry. I’m having some . . . issues.”
“Issues?”
“Not your fault.” He took back the binoculars. “And I’m in a relieved mood,” he added, answering my former observation.
I guessed that made sense, considering what he and Adra had found on their scouting trip. Because it seemed that we’d been getting our panties in a bunch for nothing. All the Ancient Horrors had been present and accounted for; even better, there were no signs of tampering with the wards that kept them that way.
And they weren’t happy about it.
Their “incarceration” didn’t sound so bad to me, being little different than what had been done to Pritkin when he was exiled to earth. They could roam around a cluster of prison worlds, in environments friendly to whatever form they usually manifested; they just couldn’t leave. But while Pritkin had been fine with that arrangement, the Ancient Horrors didn’t feel the same way.
He’d described them as seething against their bonds and scheming to get out, those that had mind enough to do so. While others raged and savaged each other and bellowed like animals—or monsters. It seemed they’d taken after their godly ancestors in more than just power, because they treated the peaceful life like it was genuine torture. If they couldn’t terrorize and murder and subjugate, what the hell was the point?
But they weren’t out, and they weren’t going to be, with Adra and the council beefing up security and adding layers on top of layers to their wards.
I still had ninety-nine problems, but those bitches weren’t one.
The damned pass ahead of us, on the other hand . . .
“So there’s three ranges of mountains?” I asked Pritkin.
He nodded, staring through the binoculars again. “Arranged in concentric circles. The fey always say that Aeslinn doesn’t need walls around his castle; the terrain made them for him.”
“Or he made the terrain,” I said, because his command over his element seemed kind of extreme.
But Pritkin shook his head. “He doesn’t have that kind of power, although the gods he worships may have, at one point. Legend says they built his castle for themselves, when they first discovered this world, using it as a command center for their conquest of Faerie.”